Awesome Led Cube

Introduction: Awesome Led Cube

You never know when you might need a glowing cube to convince people you are from the future.

Step 1: Materials and Tools

To make this you will need:
A LED (preferably high power)
a 3 volt coin cell battery
a 100 ohm resistor (anything close to 100 will work)
a momentary or push button switch.
thin sheet metal
plexiglass

tools:
hot glue gun
metal shears
sharpie
saw
soldering iron

Step 2: The Box

Cut out 6 squares of equal size from the plexiglass with a saw.
Use the hot glue gun to make them into a box. Leave off the last side for now.
Drill a hole in one side of the box, make the hole large enough for the button on the switch to be pushed through it.

Step 3: Lighting

Solder together the switch, resistor, and the led.
Duct tape the two wires that remain to the battery.
Hot glue the assembly to the inside of the cube with the button in the hole.

Step 4: Finish the Box

Fill the box with hot glue to diffuse the light.
Glue the final side on.

Step 5: Armor

Cut out of the sheet metal futuristic designs and glue them onto the cube.
Make sure that when you glue onto the button you don't stop it from being pressed down, and that it sticks out enough to be pushed down.

To give you an idea, Duck-Lemon made two templates. (last pictures)

Step 6: Time Travel!

Use the cube to slow, stop, or reverse time, or even turn ordinary technology into transformers. Your choice.

It looks the best in the dark.

Comments

I loved this idea, but instead of a single led I used a portion of an LED strip light, and left a small hole on the back to plug into power. It's not as portable, but you don't have to worry about a battery going bad.

One Idea. If the Battery in these things are empty, youll have to throw it away, I guess. How about adding a Supercapacitor and an inductive charger to it? So youll have to shake it if you want it to Light up. I thought that would be kinda cool and youll wont have to worry about empty Batteries!

I have a solution for anybody who thinks they will need to change the battery. Instead of using a battery to power the LED, you could use inductive coupling (a.k.a wireless electricity). However, this would only work if you wanted to place it on a table an light up, or something like that....

is there a way of drilling srews into plexi glass. i was going to make a music shelf and i thing glueing just isnt going to cut the job. i will then attach it to a wall socket and use this instructable to make it glow. i will cut a pattern to conserve the amount of usb's and the overall power being used.

Technically it should be n^3. If the main face that you are having to fit the other pieces to is n x n, then each side of the final cube will equal n. Therefore it should be simply n^3. If you want the interior volume, then it would simply be (n - 2d)^3, where d is equal to the thickness of one side. Hope that helps.

Sorry, I hate to nitpick, but wouldn't it be one at n x n, two at n x (n-2d), and two at (n-d) x (n-d)? You have to account for the thickness of the squares twice if d equals the thickness of one square.

I'm not so sure.
All the lateral pieces could be the same size and overlap at the edges, but then the cube would be taller than the cube is wide--by the thickness of the plexiglass x2--because one base sits on top of the lateral side's and the other one is underneath them. this wouldn't matter all that much if the plexiglass was thinner and the cube was larger, because the difference in the sides would not be obvious.
To be a perfect cube, the bases would have to be a little bit smaller (the width of one plexiglass pice subtracted from the length of the sides) to fit inside of the four lateral panes.